The Göttingen Cognition Forum: Curiosity & Interaction

Session

Cognition, Circuits and Cells

S5

15 Oct 2025, 11:55

Adam-von-Trott-Saal (Tagungszentrum Alte Mensa)

85. Lateral hypothalamic orexin/hypocretin circuits affect vision on multiple scales in mice.

Cornelia Schöne (UBZU)

15/10/2025, 11:55

Session 5: Cognition, Circuits and Cells

Oral presentation

Lateral hypothalamic orexin/hypocretin (OH) circuits are required for stable consciousness and loss of OH signals cause narcolepsy in humans, dogs and mice. While it was previously shown that OH predominantly activates deep cortical layers responsible for cortical brain state dynamics, here we show that orexin knockout (KO) causes a striking 50% reduction in the amplitude of fast glutamatergic...

71. Dendritic predictive learning enhances the detection of salient stimuli for adaptive behavior

Lucas Rudelt (MPI for Dynamics and Self-Organization)

15/10/2025, 12:15

Session 5: Cognition, Circuits and Cells

Oral presentation

A central function of cognition is to detect relevant sensory signals to adapt behavior.
To this end, a specialized neural system in insects learns associations between relevant sensory inputs and beneficial changes in behavior, the mushroom body (MB). However, whereas the prevalent idea is that learning in the MB mainly occurs during the presence of explicit reinforcement, such as sucrose...

68. Sensory neural codes in the human temporal cortex flexibly adjust representational geometry to meet multiple task demands

Tarana Nigam (Cognitive Neurobiology, Research Center “One Health” Ruhr, University Alliance Ruhr, Faculty of Biology and Biotechnology, Ruhr-University Bochum, Bochum, GermanyNeural Circuits and Cognition Group, European Neuroscience Institute Göttingen - A Joint Initiative of the University Medical Center Göttingen and the Max Planck Institute for Multidisciplinary Sciences, Göttingen, Germany ; Perception and Plasticity Group, German Primate Center, Leibniz Institute for Primate Research, Göttingen, Germany)

15/10/2025, 12:35

Session 5: Cognition, Circuits and Cells

Oral presentation

Humans excel at rapidly learning and flexibly performing multiple tasks. This cognitive flexibility is thought to be the hallmark of human intelligence. Flexible learning requires retaining and utilizing previously learnt information while remaining sensitive to changes in the environment as well as rapid mental adjustments across different tasks. An open question remains how the brain...

90. Heterogeneity and response sharpening in balanced ring models

Mohammadreza Soltanipour (Göttingen University, CIDBN)

15/10/2025, 12:55

Session 5: Cognition, Circuits and Cells

Oral presentation

Ring models are widely used in neuroscience to study fundamental mechanisms such as response sharpening and working memory. Ring networks composed of spiking neurons in the balanced state can reliably reproduce the irregular activity observed in vivo and exhibit phenomena like response sharpening through local inhibition and feature tuning emerging in random networks. In principle, balanced...

97. Synaptic and neuronal heterogeneities to improve computation and artificial intelligence

Christian Tetzlaff

15/10/2025, 14:00

Session 5: Cognition, Circuits and Cells

Oral presentation

Heterogeneity is an inherent feature of biological systems that is often treated as a source of noise or disregarded in analyses of network function. In a series of computational studies, we systematically examine task-independent, intrinsic heterogeneity within neuronal systems and evaluate their role in solving a wide range of tasks with varying levels of complexity. Our findings demonstrate...